How to take up space when you’ve only been given the margin
installation with 30in x 30in x 30in pink neon form, mini-LCD screen, and Twitter enabled software activating archival video of Sylvia Rivera’s 1973 speech “Y’all better quiet down!”
This is a work that questions the viability of hashtag activism in an era of networked culture. Working through gestures of presence and absence, this work remembers the life and work of trans Latinx activist Sylvia Rivera, a womxn fiercely committed to engaging in activism related to housing displacement, incarceration, abuse, and income inequality within LGBTQI+ spaces. A critical voice and advocate for queer and trans people of color, she was revered as one of the mothers for an intersectional civil rights movement and who remained critical of oversimplified gestures for equality. Foregrounding one of the few captured moments of Rivera where she highlights the structural inequalities within the LGBTQI+ movement following the Stonewall Riots, this work scans the Twitterverse for instances of the hashtag #lgbtq and advances the video frame by frame at each tweet using that hashtag. In this moment, after an actual fight to even get on the stage to speak, she criticizes primarily white cisgendered gays and lesbians for excluding her and other trans-people and people of color from any of the conversations surrounding LGBTQI+ rights, particularly as those conversations didn’t account for incarcerated, poverty-stricken, and/or non-passing queers that jeopardized the safety of their livelihoods. As a gesture to her work and life, this project attempts to bring her back into the conversations for equity and for the current LGBTQI+ rights movement to consider other intersectional battles that have the potential to liberate the particularly marginalized. Immediately tethered to the frequency and prominence of #lgbtq, the image of her call to action is frozen to a still when the hashtag is no longer in use, pausing intermittently as the conversation subsides. She is only made active when the Internet is engaged in the broader conversation for LGBTQI+ liberation.